Foursome (25 page)

Niall almost laughs but he manages to stop himself and pretend he was choking on his water. ‘You want to do documentaries?’

‘No,’ Heather says testily, ‘not documentaries.’

‘Not exactly documentaries,’ I say, trying to rescue the situation, ‘but… you know, those shows where you see behind the scenes, where she can interview people and show off a bit more of her personality. Like… backstage at
Britain’s Brightest Star…
’ I add, clutching at straws.

Niall, as ever, looks at Heather rather than me. ‘You want to do back-up shows? Someone else fronts the show and you do little inserts or a support show on BBC3? That doesn’t feel like a big career move to me.’

Heather glares at me. For God’s sake. I wish she’d speak for herself. Surely she must have some idea what she’s capable of?

‘Not back-up shows, no. More like… What Heather was thinking of was more like… I know, say there was a new series, a new talent show to replace
Britain’s Brightest Star
because surely it can’t go on forever…’ I realize that dissing the BBC’s flagship show is probably not the most sensible idea I’ve ever had so I add, ‘Or maybe it could run in the summer when
Brightest Star
isn’t on, anyway, Heather could front it but, also say there was a show mid week. Where they did a catch up on all the training and what had happened in the house since last week’s live programme. Sort of like
Big Brother
, but then they have the talent show on the Saturday. Heather would be great at being in the house, getting to the real stories behind the contestants, finding out who hates who and getting them to spill the beans on who they think their biggest rival is or who is getting on their nerves.’

I’m on a roll now and everyone seems to be paying attention so I carry on. ‘In fact, you could do it twice a week, say on a Tuesday and Thursday. It’d be a real event. Eight o’clock, BBC1. Maybe you even introduce a mid-week heat so one person doesn’t even get to the Saturday show. The audience votes them out based on what they’ve seen of the rehearsals and what they’ve behaved like in the house. If they’re a pain in the arse, they don’t even get to compete. So you’d still have Heather doing what audiences love to see her doing, but then you see another side to her too. That’s it, isn’t it, Heather?’

‘Exactly,’ she says, smiling finally. ‘That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about.’

‘That’s really not a bad idea, actually,’ Niall says, addressing me directly for the first time. ‘
Britain’s Brightest Star
meets
Big Brother.
That’s really not bad. Is this your idea?’

I’m so tempted to say yes. I’m so proud of myself I want to bask in the glory, but I have to remember the job at hand. ‘Well,’ I say. ‘We sort of all came up with it together.’

‘So you’d be prepared to break your ITV contract if, say, we wanted to look at doing this next summer?’ Niall says to Heather who is positively animated now.

‘Oh yes,’ she says, and I remember why I’m here and jump in. ‘Well, we’d have to talk about it further, first. The deal would have to be right. I mean, Heather’s ITV contract is very lucrative and –’

‘Of course,’ Niall says. ‘We’ll get an offer together and we can meet up again in a few weeks to discuss it.’

He’s looking at me now so I say, ‘Great. Lorna, you’ll be properly back in action by then so I can set something up with you and Niall…’

Lorna nods half-heartedly.

‘Oh, I think you should be there too,’ Niall says. ‘You seem to have the clearest idea of what it should be.’

‘Oh yes,’ says Heather, my new best friend. ‘Rebecca has to be there.’

I look at Lorna, expecting her to be glaring at me – how dare you steal my job, you bitch – but she gives me a small smile of what I think might be encouragement. I nearly fall off my chair.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘I’d love to.’

28

I’m so full of my own marvellousness that I completely forget about Isabel and Luke until it’s too late to ring her and wish her luck. There’s no doubt that the lunch went well. Niall seems as excited by the idea of
Big Britain’s Brightest Brother
, as I am now calling it in my head, as he is by the prospect of Heather fronting it. Heather is buzzing with excitement and gratitude, and she seems to have forgotten Lorna’s flakiness and the fact that I am completely unimportant, because as we say goodbye she says, ‘Let’s all go out for a drink one night to celebrate, the three of us,’ and I smile and say, ‘Great,’ despite the fact that I can’t think of anything I would rather do less.

Lorna doesn’t mention going home again so we sort of drift back to the office together. We don’t speak on the way, but that’s fine because I have so much going on in my head I wouldn’t really be capable of holding a conversation anyway. Niall Johnson, the Controller of Entertainment Commissioning at the BBC likes my idea.
My
idea that I came up with on the spot is probably going to be on the television. Of course, no one will know it was my idea, I’m not about to start fighting for format fees and credits because the point is I shouldn’t have been at that lunch anyway, the point is that it’s our job at Mortimer and Sheedy to get good jobs for our clients even if that involves coming up with the ideas ourselves. The point is that when – if – that programme ever airs
I
will know and that will be enough.

I’m not sure how we are going to play it back at the office because Joshua and Melanie are certain to want to know how the meeting went and do we tell them about my involvement or not? I’m assuming not. To tell them would create even more questions needing answers. I decide to leave it to Lorna.

I settle down to type some letters, but it’s hard to concentrate. Lorna shuts herself in her office and a few minutes later I hear Joshua tap on her door and go in. I wait with bated breath for him to come out again but then Melanie walks through reception and says to Kay, ‘Do you know how the Niall Johnson meeting went?’

Kay knows the truth. Well, she doesn’t know the details, but I muttered to her about having had to go to the lunch when I first got back. She looks at me and I shake my head, trying to tell her not to mention the fact that I was there.

In the end she plumps for complete ignorance and says, ‘No, Lorna didn’t say.’

I keep my head down, hoping Melanie will go away but she hangs around talking about nothing with Kay until Joshua comes back and says, ‘Sounds like it went well. Apparently Johnson is going to come up with a proposal for Heather based on some programme idea she wants to do that he likes.’

‘Wow,’ Melanie says, ‘that’s great. We’ll need to keep it quiet for a couple of months, obviously…’

‘Obviously,’ Joshua says. ‘Lorna’s hoping she can negotiate a big new three-year deal for her off the back of this. Plus Heather will own a share of the format by the sounds of it. It could earn her a fortune.’

‘And us, hopefully,’ Melanie says, putting into words what’s really on Joshua’s mind.

‘Congratulations, Lorna,’ she adds, spotting Lorna on her way to the kitchen. ‘It sounds like you handled that really well.’

‘Thanks,’ Lorna says, smiling. She doesn’t look at me.

The rest of the day goes by in a blur and it’s only when I’m on the tube on the way home that I remember I was going to call Isabel. By the time I get off and have a signal again it’s too late. She’s meeting Luke at six thirty and I don’t want to ring in the middle of their confrontation so I send a text that says, ‘Good luck. Call me as soon as it’s over,’ and I go home and wait nervously for her to let me know how it went.

Dan is as anxious as me so we try to distract ourselves by offering to help the kids with their homework. It doesn’t really work because Zoe’s idea of getting assistance is to leave the room and hope we just do it all for her, which is against my principles, and William thinks that children whose parents oversee their homework are ‘lame’ and he flat out refuses our offer.

Dan helps me with the tea and we try to talk about other things to take our minds off it. To be fair he’s really keen to hear about my day, especially when I get to the part about having to go to the lunch. He makes a big show of being proud of me for saving the day as he puts it. Plus he claims to like my idea, but I think he’s just being kind. Dan hates reality TV.

By half past seven I’m really starting to worry. How long does it take to say ‘I know you have a wife. It’s all over’?

‘You don’t think he’s talked her round, do you?’ I say to Dan.

‘Who’s talked who round?’ William says, scraping the last bit of ice cream off his plate noisily.

‘No one,’ Dan says, and William rolls his eyes.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘No,’ says Dan, looking at me. ‘I don’t think so. Maybe she didn’t want to bring it up right away. Maybe she was trying to give him a chance to say it first.’

‘So there is something,’ William says. ‘Who’s she?’

‘Duh,’ Zoe says. ‘Thick boy.’

‘It’s grown-up stuff,’ I say. ‘Which means it’s none of your business.’

‘Then why are you talking about it in front of us?’

He has a point but luckily, at that moment, my phone rings and it’s Isabel so I take it into the kitchen to answer it.

‘Well?’ I say before she can even say hello. ‘Are you all right?’

According to Isabel she and Luke had met in the bar area of the little restaurant where they were supposed to be having dinner. She waited until she’d got a glass of wine because she wanted some Dutch courage. Meanwhile Luke had chatted about his day like nothing was wrong. He seemed so relaxed, she tells me, so unfazed by being out with her in public that for a moment she started to believe that we’d got it all wrong.

‘I mean,’ she says, ‘I thought, why would he have agreed to meet my friends?’

‘Because he thinks he’s invincible?’ I offer up. It has been bothering me a little that Luke was happy to be so indiscreet. The only way I have been able to rationalize it is to believe that he has supreme confidence – arrogance, actually – that has allowed him to believe he will never be caught. His family don’t live close by any more and Charlie will be leaving the school in the summer; he must have figured he might just get away with it. Or maybe his wife is one of those women who would just put up with it if she found out, rather than have to start a whole new life on her own. Perhaps he does this all the time and she sits in their house in Highgate waiting for him to come to his senses again.

Anyway, Isabel tells me, she knew that she couldn’t weaken so she waited until she’d had a few sips and she’d asked him how his weekend had been.

‘Great,’ Luke had said. ‘Me and Charlie went Christmas shopping in Richmond on Saturday and yesterday I took him to the little cinema up the road. They were showing a rerun of
Willie Wonka
. He loves that film.’

‘And then what? You take him to school on a Monday morning and then your wife picks him up in the afternoon? Is that how it works?’ Isabel asked, trying to sound casual and not like she was conducting an inquisition. Luke, she says, had the good grace to look a little nervous under questioning.

‘Yes,’ he said, and he tried a little laugh, ‘that way we don’t have to see each other more often than necessary.’

Isabel says that at this point, in the face of this blatant lie, she nearly lost it, but she decided to see how far she could push him, how easily he could look her in the eye and deceive her. She decided, she says, that if she could witness him behaving that badly then it might help her to get over him more quickly.

‘It must be hard,’ she’d said to Luke then, ‘disliking each other so much, but still having to deal with each other because of Charlie.’

‘Hard is an understatement,’ Luke had said. ‘Like I told you before, we can hardly bear to be in the same room together, let alone speaking.’

‘You never told me why you split up…’

I interrupt her telling me the story. ‘Good one, Izz.’

She carries on.

‘You never told me why you split up. Did you just fall out of love with each other or did one of you do something bad? I’m guessing something must have happened because of how much you seem to hate each other.’

Luke, she says, clearly has an answer prepared for the eventuality of this question ever being asked. And it’s one guaranteed to put him in a good light. Or, at least, to put his wife in a bad one. Although the irony is laughable.

‘She was seeing someone else,’ he’d said, assuming a martyred expression.

‘Oh God, how did you find out?’ Isabel had asked him, all concern.

‘I found messages… text messages from him, and I confronted her. She tried to deny it, but I knew that I was right and, eventually, she had to admit it was true. She chose him over me when it came down to it.’

‘You poor thing. I can’t imagine how awful that must feel. Thinking you know someone, that you love them, and then finding out they’ve been deceiving you all along.’ At this point, she tells me, she looked him right in the eye but he didn’t even have the decency to flinch.

‘It was,’ he’d said instead. ‘But then, if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have met you…’

Isabel wasn’t finished. ‘It must have been soul destroying. It would be like… oh, I don’t know… me finding out that you weren’t really separated or something. That you’d been telling me all this time that your marriage was over but it wasn’t…’

She’d nearly laughed at this point, she says, not because she felt happy, far from it, but because the whole situation was so ludicrous. Luke’s confident front had dissolved somewhat after this and apparently he had tried to change the subject and brought up something banal about work. Isabel had had no intention of letting him off the hook, though.

‘I mean, I can’t really think of anything worse, can you? Than being deceived by someone like that. Being forced to become something you would never knowingly become. Like a mistress. Because I would never – not in a million years – agree to be anyone’s mistress.’

She’d paused here, having laid her cards squarely on the table, to give him one final chance to confess, but he’d chosen not to take it, asking her if she’d like another drink instead, getting up from the table and picking up their glasses. This had made her really angry. It was as if he thought that if he could distract her for a minute then she would forget all about what she had been saying. Clearly Luke had no intention of ever doing the honorable thing. In fact, she suspected that he might go up to the bar and just keep walking. Run away rather than face the music. She’d decided to go in for the kill.

‘Because that’s what I am, aren’t I? Your bit on the side?’

Luke had sat back down very quickly. He had tried to tell her that he’d never meant for it to turn out this way. He’d been feeling unhappy, he and his wife were going through a bad patch, it was the first time he’d ever done anything like this (yeah, right, she says). He’d told her that he’d meant to break it off ages ago, but he had found that he really liked her. In fact, he had realized he was falling in love with her and he hadn’t been able to. He told her all this like it was meant to make her feel better. There were tears on both sides. Then he said to her that he really had been thinking about leaving his wife since he fell for Isabel and she decided that she had to leave, quickly, before she got taken in again by his, very convincing, bullshit.

‘It was awful,’ she says. ‘It’s scary how easy it would have been to just carry on, to ask him to really leave his wife.’

‘You’ve done the right thing,’ I say.

‘I know. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it. I’m on my own again. I’ve been completely taken for a ride by someone I genuinely cared about. I mean, I thought he was my gateway to a new life. God, I’ve been stupid…’

‘Come round. We’re not planning on doing anything, just watching TV…’

‘I think I will,’ she says. ‘I don’t feel like being on my own at the moment.’

So, Isabel, Dan and I spend the rest of the evening lounging around on the sofas in our living room. Every now and then she gets a bit tearful and one of us will give her a pep talk and bring her tissues to mop up her tears. I haven’t yet told her about Alex’s plea to me and I’m not sure what to do. The last thing I want would be for her to take Alex back. Not just for my own selfish reasons, although I know it must seem like that. I just don’t believe that it’s what he really wants or that, even if he does, their marriage would be any better this time round.

On the other hand, I’ve learned my lesson. It’s nothing to do with me. Isabel will have to decide for herself what she wants and in order to be able to do that she needs all the facts. And by that I mean
all
the facts. So, if I tell her that Alex wants her to know that he genuinely feels he’s made a mistake and that he’s desperate to give their relationship another try, then I have to also tell her the full truth about his declaration of love to me and even about all the other women. Give her both sides of the story and absolutely no advice, no trying to sway her in either direction. And I’m not sure I’m capable of that even if I did decide it was the right thing to do.

I decide to wait, talk it over with Dan later. There’s no rush. Isabel isn’t in the right state of mind to make such a big decision yet anyway and I can’t imagine that Alex is going anywhere.

Rebecca and Daniel. And Isabel. It’s not so bad.

Lorna is looking good. It’s like she somehow had a makeover in the middle of the night. Her clothes are ironed, her nails are polished, her hair while still a bit of a mess is at least washed. When I walk past her office at twenty past nine, on my way to my reception area, she seems to be tidying up, throwing piles of old papers on to a heap in the middle of the floor. I can’t be sure if this is a good sign or if she’s actually become manic so I sneak past without saying hello.

There’s a big bunch of flowers on my desk with my name on. I open the card and flush with pride as I read the message which says ‘I can’t thank you enough. Love Kathryn.’ I arrange them in an old vase and sit and admire them. No one has ever sent me flowers at work before. Or, at least, for not-work-related reasons.